


A Hidden Mercy

by werepope (quiteparadise)



Series: The Start of Something [5]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fatherhood, Loss, M/M, Marriage, moving day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 02:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5440445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiteparadise/pseuds/werepope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moving house stirs up dust bunnies, tempers, and memories.</p><p> </p><p>Prompt: unopened gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hidden Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> Do not be afraid; our fate  
> Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
> 
> \- Dante Alighieri, _Inferno_

Thranduil's house is big enough for all of them but making room isn't the same as making it home.

They have a few brief but serious conversations about buying a new house. In the end, Thranduil is too sentimental and Bard too pragmatic. They won't find anything better and the market still isn't great. Better to consolidate and sell Bard's more modest house, which they can afford to sit on for a while until it sells, property taxes being what they are.

Forget that Thranduil has good investments, a trust fund, and can afford to build a brand new house for them without having to worry about selling the others for years. That's another conversation altogether.

Bard dodges a yelling blur of a creature that is most likely his youngest daughter and only barely misses putting his foot through a box. He can't read the chicken scratch on the folded flaps but the hand looks familiar.

"Bain, if you're done with these boxes they need to go out on the truck or on the porch for pick up!"

From the back of the house, muffled by years worth of dust and debris being slowly disassembled, an answering yell: "Those're Tilda's!"

"Tilda–"

"I _heard_ , daddy. I can't carry them on my own."

"One at a time."

"It's books. You told me not to carry the books. You said you'd help."

"Bain, come help your sister carry these out!"

It's a wonder of acoustics that they've spent the whole day all but screaming room from room to hear one another but Bard can make out his son's put-upon sigh with no trouble whatsoever.

"Is your closet clean?" Bard asks before Tilda can careen off again to get distracted by a long-lost jumprope or yet another desiccated ladybug corpse.

"Sigrid is doing it."

Bard drops a load of old towels to be donated to the animal shelter and just barely manages to catch Tilda before she's out the door. "Find a bag for these," he tells her, tacking on a "please" just in time to prevent a scolding. He never should have taught her that.

In the girls' room, Sigrid is the eye in a storm of clothes, folding as she sorts. The "keep" pile of her own clothes looks significantly larger than that of Tilda's.

"Calm down, da," Sigrid says, not even lifting her head to look at him. "She's outgrown most of them."

"Well." Bard nods. Smiles. "Just make sure everything that's being donated gets washed."

"Is your closet clean yet?" she asks, probably just to make him go away, if her own smile is any indication. It works, too. He leaves before she can volunteer to do it for him.

Two weeks left of summer vacation means they have just the one to go before their self-inflicted deadline is upon them. Plenty of time still to get through the rest of the house, although maybe not at the pace the kids want to work. Bard had hoped that he wouldn't have to take too much time off from the garage, but it's beginning to look like he'll need a few days after all, for the clean-up if not the actual hauling.

"Bain, those boxes," he warns as he passes by his son's open door, and stays there until Bain unearths himself from behind his propped up mattress. "It'll go faster if we all help each other out."

Bain scowls a bit but he goes, and Bard has to resist the urge to put a hand on his shoulder, rustle the mess of his curls. He remembers being that age. He's getting used to holding back.

When Tilda went from her cradle to her first big girl bed, Bard gave the master bedroom up to the girls. He doesn't need the space and he's never minded the close feeling of walls around him, not for sleeping in. He's surprised how much of the room he managed to occupy, though, now that he sees it half-empty. Walls bare, the frames all packed away carefully, wrapped up in newspaper. His dresser hollowed out except for a few days worth of clothes, enough to rotate through a couple of weeks with liberal use of the washing machine.

The closet is not quite bare. He's got no problem dealing with his own disused things: his winter coat and leather jacket, slacks and sport coat, dress shirts, a few ties permanently dented from laying draped for too long over a hanger. At the back, exposed for the first time since hanging them, are a couple of garment bags; one opaque black plastic, the other thinner white. He should have dealt with them years ago. They're no worse now for having hung for so long, although they seem to droop more, maybe, from so much time built up in the seams.

These are the last of Thora's things:

A few summer dresses, the ones he wanted to remember her in, freckles on proud display across her shoulders and spilled down into the hollows of her collarbones. They weren't appropriate for the funeral. She was too gaunt from long sickness. She had been dressed instead in a somber blue-green skirt and white blouse that her mother bought for the occasion, high collared with shiny pearl buttons, nothing she would have worn in life.

Her wedding dress, white despite the fact that she'd had it let out as her belly swelled with pregnancy. No scandal in that. No one to be scandalized really, just Bard and a few friends at a pavilion near the courthouse, her hands so small and damp in his. Not nervous, not his brave girl, but because it was so damn hot that spring. Her hairline and the tender skin between mouth and nose had been shiny. Their first kiss as husband and wife had been salty with that thin sheen of sweat.

After her funeral he gave away her shoes, threw out her makeup and the sensible contents of her underwear drawer. There wasn't a lot left. Thora herself had started getting rid of things near the end, when she was still up and about but her future was certain. He'd hated that so much, hated her even for her surety in doing it. Now all he has of her are a few pieces of jewelry that are worth passing on to their daughters and those dresses. Now he's glad there isn't more, glad she had the strength. He hasn't been able to bring himself to do more than catch them in his periphery. He can't imagine packing them up along with his own things, moving them across town to Thranduil's house, hanging them in the closet there. But he can't imagine throwing them away either, or donating them for someone else to wear.

He ignores them yet again to clean out what remains on the shelf above, truly forgotten things that have gotten crammed way at the back. A duffel bag he thought he lost, empty. A few mismatched pillowcases that probably aren't worth donating. The nylon travel case for his electric razor, also empty. And, back where he can feel but can't see, the slick of wrapping paper around a small, thin box.

For a moment he can only stare at it, harmless and unobtrusive, before he recognizes it for the incendiary device it is. Recognizes the blue paper with yellow stars on from seven, eight years ago.

Thora hated Christmas wrapping paper. Stupid thing to hate, but that was her all over. She didn't see the point of it. Why bother with it, she'd said, when you only used it once a year. Instead she'd bought the generic kind that could be pulled out for any occasion, birthdays and baby showers and anniversaries. Her own brand of practicality, like keeping a box of blank cards around just in case and refusing to buy more scotch tape because she was convinced there was a roll around here somewhere.

No telling what's inside, but she used the closets as a hiding places for a while, when Bain was into everything, curious and way too observant for anyone's good. The one in the master bedroom was out, too obvious, but Sigrid's was good in a pinch. Too good, it seems.

There's no name on it. She didn't need them. She always just seemed to know. That probably said more about Bard's lack of help in wrapping presents than it did about Thora, and he didn't appreciate it at the time, not until that first Christmas without her. He doesn't particularly appreciate it now, either.

If it's for any of the kids, he doesn't know what he'll do. He can't do that to them. Can he? Give one of them, any of them, the last gift that anyone will receive from their mother?

Fuck.

It would be better to throw it away, whatever it is. Better that they just don't know. The hurt won't be worth it, not for them, and he can take a bit more. All those old aches have been fading anyway. Maybe now's the right time for something fresh.

He doesn't really entertain the thought.

Instead he sits down on the edge of the bed and sticks his finger under the edge of the paper, a neat fold tucked under because it looked better that way, tidier, because that was the way she always did it. The tape tears clean and smooth and the paper gives way. He opens the lid.

He breathes.

A keychain. A silver-colored ring through clear, cheap plastic framing a photo of them – Thora and Sigrid and Bain. They're sitting around a low campfire, the tent visible behind them. Sigrid is holding a stick that's gummy with marshmallow on one end. Bain is grinning in that almost grimacing way that kids always seem to do at a certain age, knees skinned and hair shorter than it's been in a long time. Thora is wearing a plaid shirt over a white tank top and a pair of cut-off jean shorts, tennis shoes and socks pulled up to her calves. Tilda is invisible, just an idea still, morning sickness instead of a baby.

His first thought is only that he's glad it was for him after all. It takes a few seconds for it to hit him at full force. The picture blurs.

Out in the living room, the screen door bangs open and closed in quick succession, the usual punctuation for some yelling. It's Bain this time, calling down the hall: "Da! Legolas and Mr. Doriath are here!" followed by the low, indistinct rumble of Thranduil's voice. Probably asking Bain to call him by his first name for the hundredth time, as if the Bowmans do anything except in their own time.

Bard crumples the wrapping paper, dumps it in the open trash bag, ignores the way his chest clenches and his lungs shudder on an exhale.

"You've really got to let me hire somebody to move all this stuff," Thranduil says, twisting his way down the hall around low towers of boxes. He freezes just inside the room, and Bard has to blink a couple times to see the shocked, frozen up look on his face.

He wipes his eyes on his sleeve of his t-shirt as best he can, hiding for a moment in the crook of his elbow. He breathes a laugh that he'd meant to be self-deprecating but that comes out flatter, more broken, the rough edge of something frighteningly like a sob.

Thranduil closes the door. "I hope this isn't cold feet," he says.

Bard breathes deep until he feels capable of doing it without thinking about it. He clears his throat. "No."

"Good." When Thranduil sits down he doesn't bother putting any space between them, presses against him at shoulder and knee. "Because I already called movers."

Bard rubs his thumb over the picture of his wife and his children, still shiny and new, and turns a smile up at Thranduil. 

"That doesn't mean you get out of helping today, you know."

Thranduil's hand on his forearm is sure, his head on Bard's shoulder a given. "Anything you want," he promises.

...

At the wedding, Tilda and Bain and Sigrid wear delicate fabric flowers stitched from one of Thora's sundresses. Bard cries more than anyone, but it's a close call.


End file.
